In a new entry today, Stoyan Stefanov announces the beta release of the PEAR image manipulation package, Image_Text 0.6 (beta).

This is my first PEAR release and I was actually surprised how easy it is to package and roll out a release.

He also briefly describes the PEAR package release process (simple from his perspective) and what's required to make things go smoothly.

Image_Text Description:

The package provides a comfortable interface to text manipulations in GD images. Beside common Freetype2 functionality it offers to handle texts in a graphic- or office-tool like way. For example it allows alignment of texts inside a text box, rotation (around the top left corner of a text box or it's center point) and the automatic measurizement of the optimal font size for a given text box.